What's the matter with Florida?

This week’s endless electoral drama placed the Sunshine State in the most humiliating possible position as the counting from Tuesday’s election went on and on and on: once again, unable to declare a winner in a presidential race — even though nobody really cares.

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Unlike during the halcyon days of chads, butterfly ballots and Bush v. Gore, the White House wasn’t in the balance and the rest of the world had moved on. Mitt Romney’s campaign all but conceded the state, and President Barack Obama was busy staking out positions on the fiscal cliff.

Still, Florida remained the gray patch on the blue-and-red electoral map until early Saturday afternoon, several hours after Palm Beach County finally finished tallying its absentee ballots.

“It is embarrassing — how could it be anything but?” former Gov. Charlie Crist told POLITICO on Friday. “I love Florida with all my heart, but I’m embarrassed that leadership couldn’t get it right.”

Just imagine if the state did matter this time, said former Tampa Mayor Pam Iorio, who was president of the Florida State Association of Supervisors of Elections during the 36-day presidential recount in 2000.

“If Romney had won Ohio and Virginia, if some states had been different, we’d be right back where we were” 12 years ago, Iorio said. “We’d be right back with everyone descending on Florida and banging on the doors of the canvassing board.”

As of noon Saturday, when all counties had to submit their results to the state, Obama was leading Romney by 50.01 percent to 49.13 percent statewide, or 73,858 votes out of 8.5 million cast. While not a landslide, it’s far wider than George W. Bush’s final 537-vote victory margin 12 years ago. And it was well outside the 0.5 percent threshold that would have required an automatic recount.

The last place to turn in results, Palm Beach County, finally finished counting its ballots at 4:45 a.m. Saturday, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.

A number of provisional and overseas absentee ballots still must be counted, and state officials won’t officially certify the results until Nov. 20, The Miami Herald reported. But Saturday’s results were enough for The Associated Press to declare Obama the winner in Florida as of 12:48 p.m. Saturday.

While the problems in 2000 involved antiquated punch-card technology, confused voters and a poorly designed Palm Beach County ballot, Florida’s difficulties this time stemmed from myriad causes. They included a record-high number of voters and a multi-page ballot padded with 11 proposed state constitutional amendments — one of them nearly 700 words — as well as instances of misprinted ballots or broken scanning equipment in some polling places.

Magnifying all those problems was the closeness of the results, which kept The Associated Press and other news organizations from being able to declare a winner.

Another cause of trouble, Crist and myriad Democrats argue, was Republican Gov. Rick Scott, who signed a law shortening the period for early voting from 14 days to eight days. Scott then refused to extend those hours after throngs of would-be early voters showed up.

“You can’t have a mess like this without several contributing factors,” Crist said, adding that the shortening of early voting “has no logic to it, except that you want to suppress voting.”

Election supervisors in several counties got around the early-voting restrictions by allowing people to cast absentee ballots in person as late as 7 p.m. Tuesday.

But that left them with a crush of absentee ballots to count, all of which had to be processed by hand. For example, election workers had to verify each voter’s signature and make sure the person hadn’t already voted. (Floridians cast 2.4 million absentee ballots for this election, compared with 1.8 million in 2008, said Chris Cate, communications director for the Florida Department of State.)

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Readers' Comments (63)

Rick Scott is a disgrace to this state. I will be voting against him in 2 years,as I did before. This is blatant voter supression. And the saddest thing of all, he feels absolutely no remorse for what he has done. Floridians need to get smart and quit voting for republican govenors. They have thoroughly turned me off-forever

You can thank Governor Voldemort personally for this debacle. His blatant attempt to suppress minority voting backfired in a particularly spectacular manner, and once again has made Florida the laughing stock of the nation. This is what happens when you elect hyper-partisan Bagro zealots to office. He was shoved down Floridian throats by the Tea Party, even though his criminal activity was well known and documented, and he has been an embarrassment to the state ever since.

At this point, all I can say is that he'd better loot all he can while he's still in office, because I doubt very seriously that the state GOP will be suicidal enough to run him for re-election. Charlie Crist will be our next Governor, and I sincerely hope Scott moves out of the state he has so disgracefully mismanaged. Assuming he's not in jail by then . . .

My take is that the disruption is exactly what the Republican legislature was aiming for. So long as the goal is to suppress the vote in urban areas by burdening the ballot with spurious ballot items and imposing unnecessary and confusing procedures, the system will be screwed up. If they spent as much energy trying to figure out how to expedite the election rather than stymie it, they would have created a better system long ago. But-- we are not talking about public-spirited and enlightened legislators here-- we are talking about retrograde Republicans who will do whatever they can to delay the onset of the future, and reality. That future and reality does not augur well for them, as we have seen.

One definition of stupidity is to repeat the same defective process over and over hoping for a different result. Let's see if they wise up. I doubt it; and frankly, by the next election, it won't much matter, because they will have taken that many more steps toward irrelevance. .

Deliberate attempts to suppress the vote and steal an election is what happened in Florida. They didn't count on Obama dominating the rest of the electoral map thus rendering Florida irrelevant. Just imagine if it would have come down to Florida again? This was the end game for Republicans to take back the WH. This is not democracy!

I can say this. The longer the line the more determined I was to wait in it to vote and so did most of my fellow Floridians. We won't forget!

I salute all those voters who waiting in line for hours, even after the race was called for President Obama. They shoulld be commended! They knew that Rick Scott and his legislators were suppressing their vote every step of the way and the voters didint budge one bit. Those voters are the TRUEST of Americans.

Typiical Florida election. The Repugs doing all they can to steal it. How can tho state be so backwards in their voting. There's these new fangled electronic machines that my rural county uses. It takes seconds to vote.

Florida probably counts their votes unlike Philly or those that count the military votes! Now, let us send the vote counters from Philly and Chicago to Florida and the vote would have been counted on Monday

The answer is simple. Republican Legislature and Republican Governor and their blatant attempt at voter supression - reduced by half the number of early voting days, the consequence resulting in increased absentee ballots and the additional time to tabulate those as well as reduced poll sites both for early voting and on election day.

You can only hope that all those voters standing in line for 8 hours are the ones that voted in that obstructionist governor, Rick Scott. If Florida has a problem with their voting, HE is the problem. Get rid of him.

Thank goodness the count doesn't matter. Even if an expensive recount was done, its a mute point because it wouldn't help Romney even if he got the 29 votes. So my advice is ....GET OVER IT.

I know this is an extreme case of "Master of the obvious", but will say it anyway.

Rick Scott... you are the most pathetic, embarrassing, transparently hyper-partisan, incompetent government official in the country. And every day Florida remains "gray" on the electoral map, it just screams out, "Look me me, I'm Rick Scott, and I'm a stupid ph&%^cking moron!"